Funny walking: the rise, fall and rise of the Anglo-American comic eccentric dancer*. Issue 2 (3rd July 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Wilkie, Ian
• Is Part Of: Comedy studies. Volume 8:Issue 2(2017)
• Page Start: 182
• Page End: 196
• Publication Date: 2017-07-03
• Subjects: Funny walks -- eccentric dance -- comedy -- Bergson -- Max Wall; 700.417
• DOI: 10.1080/2040610X.2017.1343971
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2040-6118

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article will attempt to reposition comic eccentric dance as a metamorphic form that still, surprisingly, exists, and is to be found with reasonable ubiquity, in renewed incarnations within twenty-first-century media. Tracing the origins of comic eccentric dance through examples of earlier comedy performance, and drawing from Bergson's comic theory of body misalliance, this article will discuss this particularly ludic fusion of music and comedy. Further changes to the form affected by modernist preoccupations during the new Jazz Age at the turn of the twentieth century will be suggested. Finally, ways in which the formulation lives on in twenty-first-century incarnations in the comedy work of, for instance, Jimmy Fallon and Ricky Gervase, and in popular television shows such as Strictly Come Dancing (BBC 2004–) and Britain's Got Talent (ITV 2006–) will be posited.